One of the features
that distinguishes poetry from other genres of literature is the way it exploits
the musical potential of language. Not only do poets play with the meanings
of words, they play with the sounds of words, taking advantage of the fact that
hearing something expressed can be as pleasant as thinking about it.

The poet, in that
sense, is sometimes very much a musician, making a rhyming, rhythmic kind of
music with words, sometimes playing off the way they sound to complement what
they mean. When sound and sense complement one another-when it seems the sound
of a poem reinforces its meaning in some way--the effect is usually striking.

Although we could
spend several semesters discussing the art of poetry in all is forms and through
all its long history, we can gain a preliminary understanding quickly by getting
familiar with the two basic elements that begin to distinguish a poem's craft:

1. (WORDS) Its
heightened use of individual words--for both meaning and sound.
2. (SOUNDS) Its creative arrangement of words in lines and stanzas to produce
interesting sounds.

We'll examine each
of these points one at a time. They'll provide the anchor as we dip into some
great poems and try to figure out how they do what they do.

WORDS

"What
I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-
you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences,
sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual
doubt or conviction, some dimly-realized truth I must try to reach and realize."
-Dylan
Thomas

A
poet is using words more consciously than any other kind of writer. Aiming to
stir readers' imaginations, poets exploit the power of words to evoke thoughts,
feelings, reflections in ways that are sometimes very direct, sometimes very
indirect. A poet always picks and chooses words that are just right. Most finished
poem are very deliberate products, not something casually tossed off half drunk
at 3am, but something lovingly studied and toiled over. Even the spontaneous
prose of the American Beat poets of the 50s and 60s was the product of artists
who were very deliberate in their methods. Poetry is almost never approximate.
So you know, when you read a poem, that each word was selected carefully for
one many reasons, and that if you analyze it carefully, it will open up.

Poetry works it
magic by the way it uses words to evoke "images" that convey a lot
of meaning once you look into them. Sometimes a whole poem is that quick image,
like "You Fit Into Me" by Margaret Atwood (further discussion of this
poem will follow below). Other examples of brief poems that are simple, quick,
loaded images are Ezra Pound's "In A Station at the Metro" and Taniguchi
Buson's "The Piercing Chill I Feel" (both on your handout).

These images can
appear by the stroke of a single word, the rush of phrase, or the turn of a
sentence; or they may embody an entire short poem. The point is that every image
a poet conjures in our imaginations is evoked by word choices. The poet's skill
is his or her creative genius for creating rich, vivid images that mean so much
by choosing just the right word.

Concrete, Specific Words

A poet's word choices
may be very direct, very concrete and specific, inviting readers to imaginatively
envision something clearly and distinctly.

A brutally direct
poem that's very powerful is Ntozake Shange's poem "With No Immediate Cause."
In this poem, Shange uses more than one method to get readers to pay attention.
She uses repetition, and she uses a kind of shorthand, familiar diction to draw
us in, get us to feel the speaker's rising fear and rage-her outrage-and another
way she gets us involved is by using language that is increasingly concrete
and specific, vivid, and direct. The poem willfully, consciously, with purpose
chooses language designed to upset and shock us.

The poem begins
with the bland kind of language we're used to hearing in news reports, or buried
in a news article about a recent crime-and that's what the speaker is reading
on the subway, a news report: "every 3 minutes a woman is beaten/every
five minutes a woman is raped/every ten minutes a lil girl is molested/yet "
We're apt to pass over these statistics, though, because numbers alone don't
make us feel. I believe that is one way to read the meaning of the otherwise
puzzling "yet" that appears next. There may be other ways to read
it as well. Suppose, though, it's that the speaker knows that these numbers
alone aren't really enough to get anyone's attention. We just say, "Oh
well," and go on with our lives. But the point of the poem is to force
us to focus on the horror of those numbers, to feel something about the problem
(to "make the stomach believe" maybe, ala Tim O'Brien). Maybe the
speaker senses that most of the people on that bus (which maybe represent most
of society, say) don't really want to think about problems like this one; they
want to deny their responsibility-whether they're directly guilty, or guilty
of ignoring the problem. The poem, in my mind, becomes a kind of plea for people
to take the problem of violence against women seriously. To achieve this, Shange
has decided to employ very graphic, disturbing language to wake us up out of
our comfortable complacency.

As the speaker
begins to imagine the implications of the statistics she's read, she gets more
and more graphic, imagining the worst. We're inside her head-the poem presents
her point of view. These numbers have made her look around at the world in a
different, paranoid light. Notice how her language gets more and more intense
as she associates the statistics in the news article and begins to graphically
imagine what their real-life implications might mean. She imagines such despicable
horrors (once again, based on news stories) that she ends up completely disheveled:
"i spit up i vomit i am screaming" and even imagines herself taking
revenge, imagining what she'd say to the "authorities," presumably
after being arrested for fighting back. Do you think she really goes home and
attacks someone?

On one level the
poem is a graphic representation of what's in one woman's mind as she reads
an ordinary news report about abuse and rape-but because the poem is so detailed,
so heightened, capturing a voice and a moment so dramatically, we can also discover
other things. Maybe it's a poem about paranoia, about being afraid to ride the
subway. Or it could be a poem about how the media sensationalizes violence,
and the effects of that. Or it could be a poem about a woman who's about to
snap, and why.

Many poems operate
in this way, giving us a direct, vivid experience to contemplate. Consider Raymond
Carver's poem "Photograph of My Father In His Twenty-Second Year"
(on your handout) or "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (In The
Bedford Introduction to Literature, p. 610).

Figurative Language:
Metaphorical figures and Personification

"Visual
meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old
pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the
very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over
the ground, prose--a train which delivers you at a destination." -T.E.
Hulme

"What
is metaphor, and how does it differ from both literal and other forms of figurative
utterances? Why do we use expressions metaphorically instead of saying exactly
and literally what we mean? How do metaphorical utterances work, that is, how
is it possible for speakers to communicate to hearers when speaking metaphorically
inasmuch as they do not say what they mean? And why do some metaphors work and
others do not?" -John
R. Searle

So many poets use
language that's rich in the sense that it leaves a lot open to the reader's
imagination, giving readers full play in interpreting. A common technique is
to use figurative language-figures like simile, metaphor, and personification
abound in all kinds of poetry.

Consider how each
of these poems uses simile and metaphor to share a powerful observation.

"You Fit Into
Me" by Margaret Atwood (handout) is a brief little thing, but as you read
into it, more and more meaning emerges from the one simple comparison she's
drawing. You've hooked me but the attachment is painful, fatal maybe. The fact
that the "you" (the other) is inside the "me" (the speaker)
may represent an invasion, maybe a sexual invasion, maybe an emotional, psychological
one. Maybe this relationship has really screwed this speaker up, has really
hurt her. (I'll call the speaker a "her" for convenience, but notice
the gender isn't specified-this could go either way.) The fact that the hook
is going into they "eye" may be significant, too. The pain goes right
to the soul (the eye often represents a person's soul). And there's that play
on "eye" versus "I." If you read the last line "an
open I" it still makes sense. In a relationship you usually make yourself
pretty vulnerable but that's the risk. To make any kind of deep relationship
work, you have to open yourself up. Maybe the speaker went into this relationship
with her eyes open but she got hurt anyway. There's just all kinds of ways to
read into this. It's a beautiful little nut of a poem.

Another poem that
works its magic figuratively is Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" (handout).
In this poem the speaker is a mother talking to her son; that much we know from
the title. Why is she giving this talk to her son-that's an interesting question
open to interpretation. What is she telling her son? This isn't a dry lecture
about the value of determination and hard work. She's trying to get through
to his imagination, trying to inspire him. She wants him to know she's been
there and that even if she hasn't "made it," she's not giving up.
An interesting question to ask yourself might be: what do you think the mother
is hoping the son will strive for? What's the reward at the top of the stairs?
Material success? Spiritual peace? What do you think? As you think about this
poem, you may find yourself contrasting this mother's soft, loving voice with
the one we heard in "Girl." When you're ready, you can also visit
Hughes' other poem in your handout, "My People" and see how it employs
simile.

N. Scott Momaday's
poem "A Simile" is another example of a poem working figuratively.
This time the image is of two people, a couple, behaving "as the deer."
What does the speaker gain from making this comparison? We can picture those
frightened, self-absorbed deer walking single file, ready to fly away at the
first sign of threat. The speaker is a little bewildered as to why he and his
lover (wife?) are no longer intimate, but have become distrustful of one another.
The image of the deer is an interesting portrait of how he thinks they're behaving,
but it's not how he thinks a relationship should be. Rather than walk in "single
file" a couple should be beside one another-and you could explore all of
the connotations of what that might mean. What does it mean to walk beside one
another? To be equal maybe, to be friends. One should not hold his or her "head
high"-what might that mean? To be snooty, arrogant, self-righteous-maybe.
What might it mean to hold one's "ears forward/ with eyes watchful"?
Maybe that suggests always being on the alert, always ready to take offense-always
insecure, and never able to extend any benefit of the doubt. It's easy to misinterpret
another's words and actions. If we're always on guard like that, maybe we're
more likely to take something the wrong way-and be hurt by something that wasn't
intended to be hurtful. The hooves ready to take flight you can't work
things out if you're always too afraid to face things, if you're always ready
to run away .

A funny (but still
kind of serious) poem that works figuratively is Marge Piercy's "The Secretary
Chant" (in The Bedford Introduction to Literature, p. 531). This poem uses
metaphor throughout to humorously get the message out there that this worker
(a woman), in this job, feels dehumanized, reduced to a function. Every portion
of her body is objectified-she's the desk, the paper clips, the rubber bands,
mimeograph ink, casters. Her head goes "buzz and click" and she's
like a disorganized file. She's aware that those around her assume she has no
intellect to speak of; to them, her mind is all buzz, all click, a crackled,
crossed switchboard. She's nothing but machine, spitting out various kinds of
paper. To her boss, perhaps, she feels she is no more than the sum of all of
the objects which surround her, and which she manages. Although the speaker
characterizes herself the way she feels she's been characterized by others,
we're aware, I think, that she's satirizing the way she's been characterized.
In the end she purposely, sarcastically misspells "wonce" to jab at
those who've dehumanized and devalued her. Maybe the machine is breaking down?

One more poem we
can look at that exemplifies the way poems sometimes employ extended metaphor
is Robert Francis's "Catch" (Bedford Introduction to Literature, p.
531). Baseball lovers will have an easy time relating to the kind of "catch"
the two boys are having. The poet uses this easy familiarity to make something
potentially difficult to understand a bit easier to envision: reading (or writing,
or understanding) a poem is a little like having a game of catch. The balls
come at you every which way-there's no telling how the writer will lob those
words at you. But the words are expressive ("attitudes, latitudes, interludes,
altitudes") and the poet uses "anything to outwit the prosy,"
making readers "scramble to pick up the meaning." But the reward is
that satisfying feel, that great sound the ball makes in your glove, the way
a reader's mind clicks when he gets that "pretty one plump in his hands."

Many poets have
tried to use poetry to explore, like "Catch," what a poem is, or at
least what it does. Another famous poem along those lines which also relies
heavily on simile is Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" (handout).
To unwrap or unpack this poem, explore the implications of all the many comparisons
the speaker makes. The poem's similes help us by comparing that which is familiar
to that which is strange, and by comparing things that are solid and concrete
to that which is conceptual and abstract. Hopefully, as a result, we end up
with a more vivid understanding of what poetry is, how it operates.

Personification
is another figure of speech that poets employ freely when it suits them, sometimes
in a quick image, sometimes throughout an entire poem. When you invest animals
or other non-human things with human characteristics or emotions, you're "personifying"
them. The point might be to "give the world life and motion" (as your
textbook's glossary explains) or it might be to make some kind of sublime connection
to that world. It might even be the Buddhist precept "Thou art that"
given poetic expression.

Rainer Maria Rilke's
poem "The Panther" (in your handout) is a powerful example of extended
personification. Throughout the poem, the panther is invested with human feeling.
Is it that the speaker, observing the caged panther, identifies with the pain
of his imprisonment? Is it that the panther is able to communicate his pain,
breaking across the boundaries that separate our species, and the speaker is
sensitive to the panther's pain? As the poem opens, the speaker tells us that
the pather's vision has "grown so weary" that his eyes seem blank,
they "can't hold anything else." But does the speaker really know
what the panther sees or if he's weary? He takes further liberties in the third
line, announcing that "It seems to him there are/ a thousand bars; and
behind the bars, no world." Does the speaker really know what the panther
is thinking here? What gives him liberty to assume that this is what the panther
is thinking? He's projecting his human feelings upon the panther because he
identifies with it. Once we accept that projection, once we suspend our disbelief,
a powerful story emerges. From within that cruel cage-which might represent
any sort of loss of freedom-the world disappears; any normal vision, normal
behavior, is suspended and actions are mere motions, with no force of will behind
them. Life becomes "going through the motions." Free will is paralyzed-there's
no action but empty ritual. What happens next is that unasked for but inevitable
glimpse of freedom, that whisper of possibility as the "curtain of the
pupils/ lifts, quietly." It's not a real possibility of freedom because
the bars haven't disappeared. The bars are still there. But the "image
enters in." It's almost to painful to imagine. The glimpse of freedom tears
through every muscle, plunging into the heart (like a knife?), leaving the poor
creature (the panther, us?) to suffer. Even if you read the poem literally and
aren't interested in pursuing other levels of meaning, it's an incredibly sad
portrait. It's precisely the reason why I can't have a good time visiting zoos.
I know they do a lot of good work. But the sight of all those caged creatures!!!
I'll never forget a certain grizzly bear which lived in a permanent indoor/outdoor
exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo in Forest Park I still remember the disturbing
way it used to pace endlessly in that "ritual dance around a center,"
unable to go anywhere or do anything which would make it feel like a real bear
with real purpose and a real will. It was so obviously in misery, like this
panther. On the other hand, the polar bears a few hundred feet away were pretty
cheerful, usually playing with their big red rubber ball, splashing in their
pool, rolling around.

In "Mirror"
the speaker is an object, a mirror. So we definitely have to suspend our disbelief!
But when we do, the poem really works. In the first stanza, the mirror is in
someone's house-the woman who's mentioned in the second stanza, we can suppose.
The voice of the mirror is cold, mechanical. It's "silver and exact"-it
has a kind of steely precision to it that feels very inhuman (which is paradoxical,
since it's being given a human voice!). But it's not very human at all, swallowing
whatever it sees, being truthful no matter what the effect of its truthtelling.
I'm kind of reminded here of the "mirror-mirror-on-the-wall" from
the Sleeping Beauty fairytale. This mirror is going to tell this woman she's
not the fairest of them all and isn't going to worry how that'll make her feel.
There's no worry over seeming to be cruel. Honesty trumps kindness here. That's
a little inhuman, I think. Although we could discuss that. It's really something
of an ethical dilemma. Suppose you were this woman's mirror, in a figurative
sense, and she asks you how she "looks." If she looks terrible, will
you tell her that truthfully? What would make you tell her truthfully? Well,
this mirror decides that it's going to be honest no matter what, truthful no
matter way. It's the "eye of a little god" (which suggests omnipotence,
omnipresence), so the image it reflects, its cruel truthtelling, it's nasty
but honest reflection follows the woman around whether she's in front of the
mirror or not. Maybe the memory of what she sees there haunts her. But we get
the idea that she keeps coming back for confirmation. The second stanza continues
in the same mode. The mirror is more organic, but the effect is the same. This
time we're at a lake, and we're recalling the Narcissus myth. Should she be
searching her reflection for "what she really is"? Maybe that's where
she goes wrong. Because the effect is the same. No lying, just the same unflattering
reflection. Wrinkles around the eyes, whatever . The woman is so disturbed
by the image of her own face that she breaks down in tears, drowning the younger
self she no longer can find in a sea of tears. And every day, the old woman
peers back at her, like a "terrible fish."

More Figures
of Speech: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Apostrophe, Hyperbole

Synechdoche,
says your textbook (Bedford Intro. to Lit. 622), is a figure of speech in which
part of something is used to signify the whole. In "The Hand That Signed
the Paper" (p.622) Dylan Thomas focuses our attention on the hand of the
ruler, his five "sovereign fingers," instead of the whole person.
We come to see how this "hand" represents his imperial power--and
how such a hand "rules pity as a hand rules heaven; hands have no tears
to flow." The detached power with which the ruler. The hand has no pity,
no feelings; it's detached from the heart, and cannot feel the horrible consequences
of its actions. The pen which signs the paper is perhaps not mightier than the
sword; it is the sword.

Metonymy
is a closely related figure of speech in which some thing or some quality closely
associated with the subject is substituted for it. In "The Hand That Signed
the Paper" you see metonymy used when in the second stanza, the speaker
notes that "A goose's quill has put an end to murder / That put an end
to talk." The goose quill is something closely associated with the ruler's
power to put his signature to the service of war and murder.

These figures,
as Myers points out, help us understand, and feel, how the ruler's power is
detached from ordinary empathy, sympathy-pity-how it's inhuman, distant, remote
from all human feeling.

Apostrophe
is a figure poets use to allow the speaker to address an absent audience or
an audience that's not human and can't understand. It's really a way for the
poet to allow the speaker to "think aloud," (Meyer 623) expressing
thoughts in a organized, formal way, as if addressing some specific listener.
In the past, poets used apostrophe to signal reflections that involved extreme
or intense emotion, but writers today feel that apostrophe can be too melodramatic,
exaggerated, or "theatrical" (Meyer 623). Today, writers are more
likely to use it in a "half-serious" way, as in "To A Wasp"
(p. 624). In that poem, a simple event-a wasp flies into the speaker's kitchen
and lands in her cake batter-becomes the occasion of a mock serious question
in the last two lines: "Did you not see / rising out of cumulus clouds
/ That fist aimed at both of us?"

This last line
is not only "apostrophe" but hyperbole. The cosmic "fist"
(a synecdoche, presumably, for God) finding time and cause, amidst all the serious
struggles and suffering in the world, to take aim at a woman baking a cake and
one tiny wasp is pretty exaggerated. Writers use hyperbole, or exaggeration,
to "add emphasis without intending to be literally true" (Meyer 624).
One of the great examples of hyperbole is the seduction in "To His Coy
Mistress" (p. 581). Understatement is the opposite of hyperbole. In this
figure of speech, the speaker says less than intended, to the effect that the
point is, once again, somehow made more emphatically.

Oxymoron
is "a condensed form of paradox in which two contradictory words are used
together. Poets use it because it "arrests a reader's attention by its
seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense" (Meyer 625), and once we figure
it out, we're not likely to forget it. In Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle
Into That Good Night" he introduces an oxymoron in the final stanza: "And
you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce
tears, I pray." How can the tears be a curse and a blessing at the same
time. Paradoxically, they can. They are a curse because they are evidence of
pain and suffering, but they'd be a blessing because they'd be evidence that
the speaker's father is putting up a fight. And they are real evidence of love,
in a strange way--they signify the ill man's pain at leaving his loved ones,
his own sense of loss, and so they help the speaker feel loved.

Allusion
is not exactly a "figure of speech" but it uses language in a particular
way that will extend meaning in much the same way that figurative language does.
Allusions are "brief references to a person, place, thing, even, or idea
in history or literature....They imply reading and cultural experiences shared
by the writer and reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling
of something outside the work supplies an emotional or intellectual context..."
(Glossary, Bedford Intro. to Lit.). Allusion can be found in poems as
different as "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath, "Jazzonia" by Langston
Hughes, and "Hazel Tells Laverne" by Katharyn Howd Machan. In each
case the poet is amplifying meaning by making careful references readers will
hopefully recognize.

Symbol is
another device poets can use to extend meaning. When you can understand the
meaning of a word or passage in more than one way, the poet is probably using
words symbolically. "Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening" or another
Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" gain force when you consider
the possibility that some of the words in those poems are used symbolically.

Specific, concrete,
figurative, symbolic, connotative language is what packs a poem so tightly,
what wraps it in that neat package. The poet's skill with figurative language
makes of poetry an art of compression. It's truly amazing how much poets
manage to say with the few words they choose.

SOUNDS

To study the sound of poems, we can use the information in The Bedford Introduction
to Literature. Read pages 662 - 672; 687-692; 706-733--paying special attention
to these terms:

Page 667
Onomatopoeia--the use of words that sound like what they denote. (see "Player
Piano" by John Updike--p. 664)

Assonance--the
repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby words (time and tide)

Euphony--lines
that are musically pleasant to the ear; smooth and flowing

Cacophony--lines
that are discordant and difficult to pronounce (see "Player Piano"
by John Updike--p. 664)

Page 668
Rhyme--needs no explanation, but Meyer offers an explanation of why rhyme is
so effective. It offers a sense of closure; creates emphasis; provides structure;
draws attention to the relationship between words.
Eye Rhyme--words that look like they rhyme, but don't really rhyme! (cough and
bough)

Page 671
End Rhyme--lines that rhyme at the end of the line

Internal Rhyme--rhymes
within lines

EXACT RHYMES
Masculine Rhyme--rhyming single syllable words (shade/blade) or words that rhyme
in the last syllable of a multi-syllable word (defend/contend)

Feminine Rhyme--rhymed
stressed syllables followed by one or more rhymed unstressed syllables (gratitude/attitude) words
are longer and more syllables rhyme

NEAR RHYMES

Off rhyme/Slant
Rhyme/Near Rhyme/Approximate Rhyme--the sounds are almost but not exactly alike.

Page 687-690
Rhythm / meter / prosody--the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds.
Some writers get rhythm going by using tricks like repetition, as in "With
No Immediate Cause." More typically, the pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables creates the rhythm. Poets can create meaning and emphasis by the way
they set up their patterns of stressed syllables. When
rhythmic patterns of stresses recur in patterns, prescribed or unprescribed,
the result is the poem's "meter." All metrical elements taken together
are known as "prosody."

Foot--the metrical
unit of syllables, including (usually) one stressed and one or two unstressed.
Five kinds of feet are described in the textbook: the iamb, trochee, anapest,
dactyl, and spondee. They are differentiated by the number of syllables and
by where the stressed and unstressed syllables fall. A "stress" is
an accented syllable, and an "unstressed" syllable is an unaccented
syllable.

Iambic and anapestic are known as "rising meters" and trochaic and
dactylic are known as "falling meters." Poets often vary their meters
to vary the sound, or to call attention to a particular word. A completely steady
rhythm using the same kind of metrical foot over and over again would probably
become monotonous or sing-songy, like a children's nursery rhyme.

Line--a measure
of the number and type of feet. Counting the number of feet with the kind of
stress, you can get a pretty exact description of a poem's predominant meter.

Caesura--a pause.
Working in closed forms and exact meters, poets play with lines in various ways.
One way is to vary the sound by using pauses and stops in the middle and at
the ends of lines to vary the rhythm, create emphasis, or call attention to
something.

End Stopped--when
a line pauses at the end, either caesura or full stop

Enjambment--when
a line or stanza does not pause at its end

Page 706-733
A simple way of thinking about a poem's "structure" is to see it as
"open" or "closed." Open form poems are sometimes called
"free form" or "free verse" and closed form poems are sometimes
called "fixed form."

Villanelle--a type
of fixed form poetry consisting of nineteen lines of any length divided into
six stanzas: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The first and third lines
of the initial tercet rhyme; these rhymes are repeated in each subsequent tercet
(aba) and in the final two lines of the quatrain (abaa). Line 1 appears in its
entirety as lines 6, 12, and 18, while line 3 reappears as lines 9, 15, and
19. Yikes! Read "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (P. 715) and
you'll see how powerful such a fixed form can be.

Open Form Poetry--doesn't
conform to established patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Such poetry derives
its rhythmic qualities from the repetition of words, phrases, or grammatical
structures, the arrangement of words on the printed page, or by some other means.
The poet E.E. Cummings wrote open form poetry; his poems do not have measurable
meters, but they do have rhythm.

Lyric--a type of
brief poem that expresses the personal emotions and thoughts of a single speaker.
Just about all of modern poetry is lyric poetry! It is important to realize,
however, that although the lyric is uttered in the first person, the speaker
is not necessarily the poet. There are many kinds of lyric poetry, including
the dramatic monologue ("Hazel Tells Laverne," (p. 578) "My Last
Duchess," (p. 657) "Theme for English B." (p. 830).